The Adapter View

Lessons learned from consumer retail, banking and payments, which has seen the coming together of the digital and physical worlds and further evolution of the landscape as consumers increasingly use their smartphones to make purchases and manage their finances.

How retailers and banks have successfully integrated the physical and digital worlds

How the growth of smartphones is dictating further developments

The importance of the customer experience and the human face of a business in a digitally evolving landscape

Adapting to a continuously changing digital world

Continuing to adapt to new developments whilst championing customer-centricity is key to succeeding in a fast-changing digital landscape. That’s according to Nick Kerigan, managing director of Future Payments in Cards & Payments, Barclaycard, who will bring AM’s new conference Automotive Retail Congress, to a close when it takes place on May 21 at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry.

The final presentation follows a series of high level speakers exploring how automotive retail will evolve to 2030 at AM’s inaugural event. Aimed at the sector’s senior executives and decision-makers in the franchised and independent networks and the UK’s manufacturers, the event is sponsored by Barclays.

Kerigan will illustrate how existing retailers such as Argos has evolved its offering, transformed its business model and integrated digital to take on large online retailers and succeed. Meanwhile, the banking sector itself has also incorporated digital extensively. Apps enable customers to better manage their finances including setting spending limits through their smartphone whilst in the branches ‘digital eagles’ even help customers access the digital world by helping them set up email accounts or access the internet.

He said: “New business models such as Airbnb, which offers the most rooms online without even owning a hotel room itself, have changed consumer expectations forcing retailers to rethink the digital and the physical world. There was a time when the e-commerce and physical worlds were completely separate but ecommerce is coming into the physical world and it is winning. Businesses like Argos are doing it well whilst at Barclays we have redefined ourselves and continued to transform. We have retained and evolved our physical presence whilst growing digitally to 11m digitally active customers, including 7.6m active mobile banking users.

“For us, lessons learned include the need for an absolute focus on the customer experience and how to use both physical and digital assets together. Helping customers make that journey to digital and the human element is central. You can’t just have staff selling, they have to do some very different tasks such as answering more complex queries and keeping customers informed - they need to be the experience.

“There is an opportunity for retailers to differentiate themselves – just a few years ago Argos was a paper-based catalogue business and now it offers same-day delivery backed by a reconfigured ‘hub and spoke’ distribution model. If retailers and banks can do it, then it can be done in the motor space too.”

A must for industry senior executives looking to stay ahead in a newly developing retail environment where technology and disrupters are turning traditional car ownership on its head, places can be booked at https://www.amretailcongress.co.uk/.